Publications

The archaeology of war has often focused on combatants and weaponry, prioritising the conflicts themselves over their aftermath. Yet in today’s world, with ongoing and emerging wars, archaeology must also address the precarity and long-term consequences of armed conflict for all parties involved. This edited volume examines how the short- and long-term impacts of warfare appear in the archaeological record from prehistory to the medieval period. For the defeated, consequences may include poor diet, ill-health, physical trauma, and higher mortality – visible in bioarchaeological evidence. Victorious communities may benefit from plundered resources, leading to wealth and improved living conditions. Conflicts can also trigger migrations, whether through forced displacement or deportation, well-documented in historical texts but harder to trace in periods without written records. Finally, warfare can leave settlements and landscapes destroyed, rendering them less hospitable. Understanding the trauma of war requires examining its corporeal and material dimensions. This volume explores who gains and who suffers in the wake of conflict, through case studies from prehistoric Iberia, ancient Egypt and Nubia, Roman Britain and Pannonia, the Middle Danube “Barbaricum”, the Late Antique Balkans and eastern Mediterranean, Viking Scandinavia, and medieval Anatolia.

This paper investigates the frequency of commentary pragmatic markers in Ghanaian and Ugandan Englishes, and their use across different text categories, using the Ghanaian and Ugandan components of the International Corpus of English. These markers, which are grouped into assessment, emphasis, evidential, hearsay and manner-of-speaking markers, are explored from a variational pragmatic approach. The results show that Ghanaian English users employ an overall higher frequency of commentary pragmatic markers than Ugandan English users. Ghanaian English users utilise more commentary pragmatic markers in private and public dialogues and printed writing than Ugandan English users, while the latter employ more commentary pragmatic markers in monologues than their Ghanaian English counterparts. The study confirms the influence of local African languages and cultures on the use of some English commentary pragmatic markers, thus contributing to the research on nativisation and pragmatic variation in these varieties.

The De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Health and Society explores how digitalization is reconfiguring practices of health and medicine. Digitalisation requires health and medical practices to address and utilise the interrelated challenges posed by increased quantification (e.g., data-intensive medicine), ubiquitous connectivity (e.g., remote access to care providers), and the unprecedented power of algorithms (e.g., communicative AI). Developing important social scientific analyses of the contemporary sociotechnical configuration of health knowledge, therapeutic relationships and medical decision-making, the handbook puts forward theories and methods to inform the development, implementation and governance of Digital Health. It will therefore be an invaluable resource for shaping desirable futures in health and care.

Many socio-economic systems require positive economic growth rates to function properly. These growth dependencies pose serious challenges given uncertainty about future growth rates and the role of economic growth as a driver of environmental crises. Thus, identifying and transforming socio-economic systems that currently rely on growth for their adequate functioning is a crucial step towards effective sustainability transformations. To facilitate conceptual clarity, we propose a general definition and framework for operationalizing the concept of “growth dependence” through four elements: (1) the system under investigation, (2) the unit of growth measurement, (3) the meaning of “growth”, and (4) the functions or properties of the system relevant for human well-being. We illustrate the impact of varieties in definitions on assessment outcomes by applying the framework to areas widely seen as growth-dependent: labor markets, social insurance and public finance. Our framework helps researchers to develop a more coherent understanding of growth dependence, a prerequisite for assessing policy options towards growth independence.

Digital transformation is widely promoted as a solution to healthcare chal-lenges such as ageing populations, chronic diseases and pandemics. This has led to rapid advances in the field of digital health, driven primarily by the computer and health sciences, which are developing devices and interventions. However, digital transformation in healthcare is not always easy to implement. Repeated calls for digi-tal transformation and their technology-centric solutions fail to adequately address issues of implementation, adoption and unintended consequences. What is over-looked is the factor that moderates digital transformation, namely the society in which it takes place. It is important to recognise that society and social practices are not simply passive objects that can be transformed in a linear way. Instead, they are reflexive and responsive to experimentation and intervention. Designing and manag-ing digital transformation in healthcare therefore requires an understanding of soci-ety. The Handbook of Digital Health and Societybrings together leading social science perspectives – from sociology, media studies, STS, psychology, philosophy, political science and more – to explore the complex relationship between technology and soci-ety, and to shed light on the conditions under which digital transformation can be successful, ethical and deliver social value. The Handbook thus complements the dom-inant disciplines in the field of digital health and provides essential guidance for envi-sioning and developing appropriate and desirable solutions to current healthcare challenges.

Models of floods, disease, lakes, and fish don’t arrive ready-made – they’re patched together from code, data, software, theory, habits, and disagreement. Anja Klein follows that patchwork in action through fieldwork with two interdisciplinary research groups: a project in Accra tracking diarrhea and flood risk under climate change, and a Stockholm-based group building simulation models of social-ecological systems. How do materiality, difference, and complexity get handled in the daily work of modeling? What gets to be included and what is left out and why? Moving between ethnography and equations, the study traces moments of frictions and surprise that shape what a model can or cannot say about the world. In a grounded account of ›earthly modeling‹, the volume shows the potential of working across ethnography and simulation for knowing better our planet in crisis.

Das Handbuch Organisationssoziologie liefert einen breiten und mehrdimensionalen Überblick über die Entwicklung, den Stand und die Zukunft der Organisationssoziologie als wissenschaftliche (Teil-) Disziplin. Dabei geht es sowohl um die systematische Aufnahme relevanter Theoriestränge sowie aktueller Debatten als auch um die Wechselbeziehungen, Überschneidungen und Komplementaritäten zu Nachbardisziplinen, die Gegenstand eines dynamischen Dialogs werden. Das Handbuch vermittelt so einen eigenständigen Zugriff auf die Organisationssoziologie und bündelt gleichzeitig dessen Wissen auf dem neuesten Stand. Damit liegt ein umfassendes Standardwerk zu Stand und Perspektiven der Organisationssoziologie im deutschsprachigen Raum vor.

Seit geraumer Zeit wird auf der individuellen Ebene unter dem Stichwort des lebenslangen Lernens Lernen zur Dauerveranstaltung. Ebenso lässt sich auf der organisationalen Ebene ein Wandel des Umgangs mit Wissen beobachten. Im Gegensatz zum hegemonialen Diskurs, dass in der Gegenwartsgesellschaft alle immer und fortwährend lernen (bzw. lernen sollen – insbesondere in Organisationen und vor allem in solchen, die extensiv mit Wissen hantieren), zeigt die genauere Betrachtung, dass hier eine differenzierte Betrachtung vorgenommen werden muss. Insbesondere mit dem Aufkommen gesellschaftlicher Wandlungsprozesse aber vor allem auch vor dem Hintergrund der Digitalisierung eröffnen sich nicht nur neue Möglichkeiten, sondern es entstehen auch neue Erfordernisse, in Organisationen mit Wissen anders umzugehen als bisher.